PBS movie revisits fall of wall

Monday

Jun 28, 2010 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2010 at 9:50 AM

Former President George H.W. Bush had little interest in a documentary-style reflection on his life and career, but then the PBS station in Houston approached him about a signature event of his administration: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

Former President George H.W. Bush had little interest in a documentary-style reflection on his life and career, but then the PBS station in Houston approached him about a signature event of his administration: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

“We went to him with the idea about doing something on the fall of the wall: what happened behind the scenes, the relationships between leaders — things like that,” said John Hesse, station manager of KUHT.

The Wall: A World Divided, the first of a two-part series, will premiere tonight.

The second part of the project, about the German reunification, is likely to air in October.

The documentary includes interviews with Bush, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev — along with the students, activists and East German sons and daughters who arguably did as much to topple the wall as any pronouncement by Bush or President Ronald Reagan.

Guiding the project was Eric Stange, who also directed Brother Can You Spare a Billion, a 1999 documentary about Jesse H. Jones of Texas and his work with the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corp.

Bush, Stange said, “was a diplomat for freedom. The reforms were under way. He didn’t start them; President Reagan didn’t start them. They started in Poland, and Gorbachev opened the door and let it happen.”

In the end, the director said, the wall was brought down by a bureaucratic error — the premature announcement of a relaxed ban on travel that opened the way to free traffic between East and West for the first time in almost 30 years.

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